There is comfort in not caring about what I can do nothing to change, affect or effect, as long as I’m not just giving up. Bitterness is the shell of giving up, the indifference, purgatory; acceptance the truth, if not exactly the heaven. Foreground and background transpose: Importance rack-focuses. The shift is motivated by both fear and weariness: I fear what people think of me for belaboring my emotions over a relationship that never was; and I am weary of caring about it. So though I do, still, think of Herself, I let no one know. Keeping it to myself will make it unreal even to me one day. The woman I wanted her to be will be a woman unto herself, a fictional character I can understand. But as complete as she may become, she will only be so as a construct of my imagination; however nuanced her psychology or complex her emotions, she is yet not three-dimensional and never can be. She can’t be touched.

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Permission to be happy struggles against a habit of bitterness and blame; acceptance against judgment. Who we ware against who we are. The struggle is in the choosing. Or in allowing there to be no choice. Giving in. Having faith, even that there is something to have faith in. Or losing the faith we have. Do we need a faith? or faith? What can we afford to take for granted? What will come to our rescue? Irony and cynicism slobber under the tightrope, but let ’em go hungry while other passions consume us in a more comforting fire.

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Is my gaze on a woman tyrannical? Knowing what I mean by it, I shouldn’t have to ask the question, but I ask because I am not, apparently, allowed to judge. Am I looking upon her with appreciation or aggression? Perception trumps intent. What she sees is what I intend. I’d better not look. I’d better not even want to look. Who knows into what depths my lascivious intentions can be followed. Perception is the tyranny here in the Blame Age. My gaze injects her with fear. My gait, my stance–my very being!–how menacing they must be! How dare I! What am I? Some kind of monster? I’m sorry for both of us. I’ll retire to my manacles in the garret and allow you the run of the castle. Which one of us will be lonelier?

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It’s a woman’s world. I’ve empowered myself too late. Learning to love myself will be handier than I thought. Alone is good practice. I’ll try to accept the new order. I can only hope for a gentler place, where I can be sensitive without being considered weak. Can I understand my new role any better than the old? Will the new rules be any more useful to me than the old ones? If I was indeed empowered or entitled as a white male, it was to things of which I was largely incapable of utilizing. Nothing was truly mine for the taking, and I didn’t learn any other way to get it. Likewise, the women of my generation have not taken possession of their new advantage. They still expect me to the suitor/aggressor. Who gets the cake? and who gets to eat it? Woman made it but no longer offers it to man. Will she eat it herself or preserve it in perpetuum just out of his reach?

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There is more past behind me than future ahead of me. The end is nearer than the beginning. I see it more clearly. The past is full of innumerable presents I never had time to understand. The future promises that understanding, but the wisdom awarded smacks of consolation: What do I do with it? The future will be spent stoically mopping milk, dusting the thick-grown regret from the surfaces of a half-lived life at least three-quarters done. Wondering if living alone is worse than dying alone. Peeling away identities curling at the edges. Appreciation of, after resignation to, what’s left after the cleanup, gradually acclimating to the stark gleam of the end of tunnel.

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What is a man anymore? Is he anything at all irrelative to a woman? If humans actually are driven to mate by biological imperative, then why do I care so much to attract women beyond child-bearing years when I can still father children? Is the man who does not identify himself relative to a woman a narcissist? Is the man who does needy? Is it the woman’s definition of him that makes the man? How does she define him as good enough for her? Can she? Does she want to bother anymore? Should he care? Can he be fully realized without her? or she without him? Is a declaration of independence anything more than a capitulation to solitude? a determined resignation to loneliness? “Man”? “Woman”? Does it matter what we are?

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Getting to know love and appreciate oneself requires aloneness. Aloneness is easy. One’s toleration of it is gauge of one’s comfort with oneself. Some of us possess this comfort jealously, to the exclusion of others. Others may learn, in their solitude, to hate themselves the more, and consider it a favor bestowed upon the world to not project themselves upon it. That is a recluse. That is not me. What I am I want others to know. I can only share that about myself with which I have come to terms–that I accept in its imperfectness without judgement. I am alone, and I might be alone for some time yet–I am still judging myself and finding myself wanting–but I am not hiding.